Seesaw Scale in the Minimal Renormalizable SO(10) Grand Unification

Simple SO(10) Higgs models with the adjoint representation triggering the grand-unified symmetry breaking, discarded a long ago due to inherent tree-level tachyonic instabilities in the physically interesting scenarios, have been recently brought back to life by quantum effects. In this work we focus on the variant with 45_H+126_H in the Higgs sector and show that there are several regions in the parameter space of this model that can support stable unifying configurations with the B-L breaking scale as high as 10^14 GeV, well above the previous generic estimates based on the minimal survival hypothesis. This admits for a renormalizable implementation of the canonical seesaw and makes the simplest potentially realistic scenario of this kind a good candidate for a minimal SO(10) grand unification. Last, but not least, this setting is likely to be extensively testable at future large-volume facilities such as Hyper-Kamiokande.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Structure and prospects of the simplest SO(10) GUTs

We recapitulate the latest results on the class of the simplest SO(10) grand unified models in which the GUT-scale symmetry breaking is triggered by an adjoint Higgs representation. We argue that the minimal survival approximation traditionally used in the GUT- and seesaw-scale estimates tends to be blind to very interesting parts of the parameter space in which some of the intermediate-scale states necessary for non-supersymmetric unification of the SM gauge couplings can be as light as to leave their imprints in the TeV domain. The stringent minimal-survival-based estimates of the B-L scale are shown to be relaxed by as much as four orders of magnitude, thus admitting for a consistent implementation of the standard seesaw mechanism even without excessive fine-tuning implied by the previous studies. The prospects of the minimal renormalizable SO(10) GUT as a potential candidate for a well-calculable theory of proton decay are discussed in brief.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the CETUP'12 worksho